Geekout 37: Smart bulbs, smarter bees, and a strange Nintendo

Welcome to another of our weekly Hangouts to discuss the latest greatest in the domain of the geeks. If you’re into bees, lightbulbs, video games, or smartphones, we’ve got what you’re looking for this week.

As the technology world continues to embrace the concept of a connected home, it seems like the biggest battleground for a little while will be lighting. Since most people see lightbulbs as utterly trivial things that can be bought in cases for pennies, trying to convince someone to spend $60 on a single lightbulb sounds like a losing proposition. This is one of the reasons it seems like flat lightbulbs or Bluetooth controlled bulbs on a smartswitch would be easy targets for success against these high-end bulbs.

It turns out that there’s another important component in the connected home, and Philips nailed it with the company’s Hue light system. Giving developers control over these bulbs to do with as they please is a huge deal, and in many ways makes the Hue setup outshine the competition.

Researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratories have discovered that bees can be trained to perform simple tasks, as long as you understand their language. The team conducting the tests fitted bees with cruel looking helmets inside of tubes and exposed them to different chemicals mixed with sugar water. The end result was a group of bees that could detect the underlying chemicals, because they thought there would be nectar nearby. The end result could very well be bees that can search for bombs, but it is worth pointing out again that the training mechanism for this process is still quite ridiculous.

Nintendo’s recent success with games like Super Mario 3D World may have inspired the company to see just how far you can take a popular franchise. By teaming up with Tecmo Koei, Nintendo plans to release a mashup between The Legend of Zelda and Dynasty Warriors sometime next year. Unofficially being called Hyrule Warriors, the demonstration showed Link as the general responsible for a typical Dynasty Warriors combat sequence, only the weapons and enemies were straight out of Hyrule. Nintendo didn’t offer much more than the teaser trailer to explain themselves, but this is clearly one of those things that will either be incredible or never ever spoken of again.

Our App of the Week is holiday themed this time, and given the proximity to Christmas it seemed like Kringl was a perfect fit for the occasion. Kringl is an Augmented Reality app that allows you to record Old Saint Nick in the act. You can capture a few seconds of him checking his list or searching for presents under the tree. These clips can be shared with friends or just offered as evidence that Santa is real when the kids get nosey about why you were stacking those presents late last night instead of the big man in red. Kringl is available for iOS and Android for free, so enjoy!

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